Andrew Sullivan hasn’t been worth reading for years as he descends into the fever swamps of paranoia and conspiracy, but I find this hilarious. Michelle Malkin points out Sullivan’s fever dream hatred of Sarah Palin has reached epic proportions.

Sullivan, the man who still thinks that Sarah Palin’s youngest child, Trig, is really the son of Bristol Palin and that Sarah covered up her daughter’s pregnancy by pretending to be pregnant herself, is now accusing Palin of being a fantasist. Here and here.

Poor Andrew…the only thing standing between him and total derangement is a single tinfoil hat.

Like this:

There’s an old joke where a man walks up to a woman in a bar and says, “Will you sleep with me for a million dollars?” She thinks for a second and then says, “Sure.” The man smiles and says, “Will you sleep with me for one dollar?” The woman tosses her drink in the man’s face and says, “What kind of girl do you think I am?”

Over at the Washington Examiner, Iain Murray and Roger Abbott have an excellent op-ed addressing the notion of whether or not health care is a “right.” The whole piece is worth reading, but if you take anything away from it, it should be this chestnut from Alexis de Tocqueville:

“It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights—the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ’right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are rations of slavery—hay and a barn for human cattle.”

Over at ABC, Jake Tapper blogs about President Obama’s inappropriate and so-stupid-it’s-insulting bow to Japanese Emperor Akihito.

Tapper quotes a friend of his, an academic with knowledge of Japanese customs, and a supporter of Obama:

“Obama’s handshake/forward lurch was so jarring and inappropriate it recalls Bush’s back-rub of Merkel.

“Kyodo News is running his appropriate and reciprocated nod and shake with the Empress, certainly to show the president as dignified, and not in the form of a first year English teacher trying to impress with Karate Kid-level knowledge of Japanese customs.

“The bow as he performed did not just display weakness in Red State terms, but evoked weakness in Japanese terms….The last thing the Japanese want or need is a weak looking American president and, again, in all ways, he unintentionally played that part.

It’s good to see that even the Japanese press is covering for him by not running the picture.

Like this:

On his recent visit to Japan, Barack Obama was asked the same question every American president is asked when they go to Japan. “President Obama, you are a proponent of a nuclear free world, and you’ve stated first of all that you would like to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki while in office. Do you have this desire, and what is your understanding of the historical meaning of the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do you think it was the right decision?” The reporter followed this immediately with a question about North Korea.

The answer is really pretty simple. “The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an unfortunate, but necessary, action. It brought a brutal war to a swift conclusion and saved millions of lives, both American and Japanese, that would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese homeland.”

But that would be asking too much from the Groveler-in-Chief. Here’s how he answered:

With respect to nuclear weapons and the issues of non-proliferation, this is an area where Prime Minister Hatoyama and I have discussed repeatedly in our meetings. We share, I think, a vision of a world without nuclear weapons. We recognize, though, that this is a distant goal, and we have to take specific steps in the interim to meet this goal. It will take time. It will not be reached probably even in our own lifetimes. But in seeking this goal we can stop the spread of nuclear weapons; we can secure loose nuclear weapons; we can strengthen the non-proliferation regime.

As long as nuclear weapons exist, we will retain our deterrent for our people and our allies, but we are already taking steps to bring down our nuclear stockpiles and — in cooperation with the Russian government — and we want to continue to work on the non-proliferation issues.

Now, obviously Japan has unique perspective on the issue of nuclear weapons as a consequence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that I’m sure helps to motivate the Prime Minister’s deep interest in this issue. I certainly would be honored, it would be meaningful for me to visit those two cities in the future. I don’t have immediate travel plans, but it’s something that would be meaningful to me.

Okay, and your answer would be…?

The Japanese reporter then repeated the question, asking if it “was right” for the U.S. to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe there will be an answer this time.

No, there were three sets of questions, right? You asked about North Korea?

No answer for you! Obama then went on to talk about North Korea.

I can only hazard a guess as to why this hanging curve ball was ignored by the President. My guess, and it is just that, is that an honest answer from Obama would have been yet another apology, this time to the people of Japan. But unlike his mealy-mouthed whimperings to the Arab world, an American apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been big news. Maybe even MSNBC would have covered it. Worse, it would have been very bad news for a President that’s looking more and more like an ineffectual weakling on the world stage. It’s one thing for Obama to go before our enemies and apologize for American arrogance (always in the past, never in B.O.’s America). It’s another thing entirely to apologize for something the vast majority of Americans are glad we did.

My guess is that Obama’s no student of history, that his knowledge of America’s past comes straight out of Howard Zinn’s America-bashing A People’s History of the United States, with a bit of Noam Chomsky thrown in for good measure. He probably feels that the bombing of the Japanese cities was somehow a great moral error because his gut instinct is to be “opposed” to nuclear weapons and to believe that America is usually in the wrong (at least, up until January 20th, 2009). He’s politcally savvy enough to know that his views aren’t shared by the proles who voted him into office, however, so he artlessly dodged the question twice.

One can only wonder what “Give ’em Hell” Harry Truman would say about such an obsequious poseur in the White House.

Like this:

This probably won’t have any bearing on the final outcome, but it’s still fascinating: recounting the votes in the NY-23 Congressional district is cutting Bill Owens lead significantly. So much so that there is a slight chance Doug Hoffman could actually win.